Fertiliser is turning your plants into junkies

Fashions, trends, and truths that might once have borne scrutiny, and survived to tell the tale. Gardening has them all. It’s one of those areas in life where an opinion, backed by a germ of common sense, can get passed down from one generation to the next without ever being subject to a level of interrogation that might make it truly useful. Crocs at the bottom of pots, double digging – you know the kind of thing. That weird one about not watering your plants in the middle of a summer’s day because droplets of water on the leaves will act as tiny lenses to focus the sun’s rays and burn the foliage. The collected and dubious horticultural wisdoms I have for a long while mentally filed under the general heading “gardening bollocks” (and yes, I have tried to pitch this as an idea but perhaps it won’t surprise you to hear that no editor will commission it when I refuse to budge on having that exact phrase as the column’s name).

I’m not sure this is anyone’s fault, except, maybe our own – for being too trusting. No, hang on. Strike that... I’ve a thought incoming, and it’s this: holding on to these received wisdoms is one, possibly excusable thing. But advancing them to the less confident, or the more supposedly ill-informed, as if they’re some kind of sacred tenet that only a fool or a heretic would dare to question – well. That’s very much the province of Facebook gardening groups, and those who stalk these forums like some kind of dour horticultural priesthood should be, to misquote Ebenezer Scrooge, boiled with their own bumptiousness and buried with a stake of holly through their hearts. Harsh, but – I think you’ll agree – entirely fair.

All of which lengthy preamble is by way of introducing you to a thought that’s been going around my head these past few weeks. Really, the justification for a course of action that I’ve been wanting to poke and prod at, just in order to see if it held up under the attention.

I’ve found myself sotto voce chanting a subversive little mantra as a response to the gardening establishment telling me what to do with my roses. “Now July is here and the first flush is fading, you’ll want to feed your roses”, they say. Feed the soil, not the plant, my internal plainsong responds. “Here’s our proprietary rose food!”

Feed the soil, not the plant.